Inner Worlds

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about Aish and what I consider the Aish mentality and I’ve decided something; Aish is most definitely a cult. This may not surprise some people but the bottom line is it is without exception. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in fact as far as most cults go Torah Judaism would be one of the better ones to fall into. At its core it preaches ethical living, and tolerance. Unfortunately that is just not what comes out of it in general and that is a very big issue. For better and for worse being absolutely convinced that you have a strangle hold on the truth can be a very dangerous thing. In some ways it’s a very good thing, I find that the people whom I admire are outstanding individuals their lives are tempered by the understanding that they are doing exactly what they were put on this earth to do. They move with a sense of purpose, vision and confidence. I admire that greatly. But I have yet to be convinced.

Look I love Torah its beautiful beyond words, yes it irritates me, yes I struggle with how it fits into my life, yes some days I wish I had never discovered this. But I love it, at some of the worst times in my life, in some of the darkest moments it has been a rock to keep me together. Tethered to it I knew with no doubt that I would make I through okay. I will therefore never discount it. But I will criticize it, I will question it and I will deviate from it when circumstances permit it. Because it is not static it is dynamic and that’s where Aish really gets it wrong. It tries to box Judaism into this little tiny space where there is no room for anything but it. It claims that its brand of Torah is the most authentic, unchanging, and eternal. But it is the Torah itself that is eternal everything else is transient, Torah and Torah alone is the absolute.

This is where in my humble opinion people get really mixed up. It is when people’s minds turn into sponges disgusted as critical thinkers. Because that is exactly what makes Aish and other institutions like it cults, they disguise absorbing knowledge, knowledge where people start with similar assumptions about the world and then build them as critical thinking. But its not that’s assumption building, and when one begins to do that they can lose sight of their abilities to analyze questions critically. They are so caught up with the question or the problem that they never stop to think about the base it is built upon.

The more time I spend away from Aish the more I simultaneously appreciate the way they helped shape my mind and the more I recognize how much they poisoned it by actively discouraging the reading and understanding of philosophical works. Because the Torah is expansive it has spawned many, many great thinkers and not all of they analyzed the Torah itself. Many of them observed life; many of them saw the world in different ways. The Torah by my understanding of Jewish philosophy is life itself the world and everything that is a part of the world is the Torah. If that is the case then I think that we as critical thinkers need to give ourselves the chance to experience the world and find our own Torah within in it.